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Tim Friede has injected himself with snake venom 856 times over the last 18 years, and has he's helped create an almost universal antivenom.
It all began when the former truck mechanic from Wisconsin was building a home collection of venomous snakes, and began self-administering diluted venom as a means of establishing immunity in case he was ever bit accidentally.
Realizing that he had achieved a level of hyperimmunity that was unusual for a human, he began reaching out to the therapeutic community asking to be researched in order to generate a universal antivenom.
Tim Friede is now Director of Herpetology at Californian vaccination research company Centivax.
